About us
For over 50 years, Bacs has been at the heart of the payments industry. On 1 May 2018, Bacs Payment Schemes Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of the new home for UK retail payments, Pay.UK. The Direct Debit and Bacs Direct Credit are owned and operated by Pay.UK.
No one has more authority when it comes to Direct
Debit than we do. Indeed, we are responsible for the schemes behind the
clearing and settlement of automated payments in the UK, including Bacs
Direct Credit as well as Direct Debit. We have a proud record of
maintaining the integrity of payment related services throughout four
decades.
Since its inception, more than
140 billion transactions have been debited or credited to British bank
accounts via Bacs and, in 2019, 6.5 billion UK payments were made this
way. A new record was set in November 2019, with 124 million
transactions processed in a single day, while the value of transactions
processed reached £58.8 billion on one day alone in April 2017, another
record.
More than 4.5 billion Direct Debits were processed in 2019 and almost nine out of ten British adults have
at least one Direct Debit commitment.
Bacs Direct Credit is used chiefly for paying
wages and salaries. In fact nearly 90% of the UK workforce is paid in
this way. That’s around four million wages every week and nearly 25
million salaries a month. One billion benefit payments are made via Bacs
Direct Credit - it is also the payment method of choice for a range of
other applications such as pension payments, employee expenses,
insurance settlements, dividends and refunds. If you are interested in
finding out more about using Bacs Direct Credit.
For more information about Bacs visit www.bacs.co.uk.